Americans Vera Todd Hays and Florice Bessire never planned to end up in Australia; less still, an Australian prison.
After the retirees headed off on a campervan holiday in 1977, many things happened that they could never have predicted.
Five months into what should have been the trip of a lifetime, Hays and Bessire found themselves at the centre of what was then Australia’s largest ever drug haul.
Their first holiday overseas had spiralled into a nightmare, and they could see no way out of it.
The threats begin
Hays and Bessire were close companions, as they referred to one another, who met in the early 1950s on an aircraft assembly line.
They lived together in a small Oregon town surrounded by national forest and they loved the outdoors.
So when Hays’ nephew Vern offered the two women an all-expenses paid campervan trip they were interested, if a little unsure, explains journalist Sandi Logan.
Logan has followed the women’s story for decades and is the author of Betrayed, a book about their lives.
He tells ABC RN's The History Listen that Vern, an entrepreneur, asked the women to fly to Germany to collect the campervan, then spend a few months driving it across Europe and through to India, where he'd then ship it to Australia for a film company he said he'd established.
Ultimately, the offer was too alluring and on August 26, 1977, Hays, aged 59, and Bessire, 61, set off.
But when they arrived in Mumbai in mid-October, Logan says one of Vern’s associates, Australian antiques dealer Philip Shine, approached the women and demanded they fly to Australia and pick up the van there.
“[Shine] also threatened violence by unnamed people.”
Hays and Bessire felt obliged to do as they were told. But they insisted that once the van was in Australia, they would return home.
They flew to Australia on November 10, 1977 and waited for the van to arrive at the shipping docks in Melbourne.
They didn't know it then, but they weren’t the only people keeping watch for the van’s arrival.
'They were around about my grandmother's age'
“From the mid-1970s, Australian narcotics analysts had detected a pattern of vehicle importations from Bombay [now Mumbai], supposedly by tourists planning to drive around Australia,” Logan says.
“The only thing was the vehicles turned out to be crammed full of hashish.”
Hays and Bessire’s campervan fit the profile – though its drivers didn’t.
“Elderly ladies” is how former Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent Michele Khoury, who worked as an undercover surveillance officer tracking the campervan, describes Hays and Bessire.
“They were around about my grandmother's age and I was a bit stunned by that,” she says.
Nonetheless, having caught the attention of authorities, the women were now being monitored 24 hours a day by undercover surveillance cars and a listening device secretly installed in the van.
Vern was pressuring the women to keep driving the campervan around country Victoria and New South Wales.
When Hays and Bessire asked why, he’d say they didn’t need to know. Each time the women tried to end their holiday, “Vern would up the ante by threatening them”, Logan says.
They were becoming increasingly stressed about the situation they were embroiled in. Then in January 1978, Hays’ high blood pressure landed her in a Sydney hospital.
With flights back to the US already booked and not knowing how long Hays would need to stay in hospital, Bessire made the difficult decision to fly home on her own.
But when she checked in for her flight at Sydney Airport, she encountered two men in suits.
The authorities had moved in.
'Biggest ever haul of hashish in Australian history'
While Bessire was being intercepted by narcotics agents at the airport, Khoury and her colleague, inspector Bob Drane, arrested Hays at hospital.
“Her face absolutely dropped,” Khoury remembers. “And her first inquiry was, ‘Where's Beezie [Bessire]?’”
When she learnt Bessire was in a women’s prison, Hays asked, “What the hell for?”
ABC TV's current affairs program This Day Tonight broke the story.
“The customs department has made the biggest ever haul of hashish in Australian history," the news story reports.
In an interrogation room, Khoury showed Hays a sample of the drug stash, which was found under the floor of the campervan.
“In her own inimitable style [she] said, and I quote, ‘No wonder that motherf**ker wouldn't go up them f**king hills’,” Khoury remembers.
Duped by a dodgy nephew
In April 1978, Hays and Bessire were each sentenced to 14 years’ imprisonment. The prospect horrified them.
“You can't believe what you're hearing. You're scared to death,” Hays told Logan in an interview from prison in 1981.
Nothing in their lives had prepared them for what they would encounter at Sydney’s maximum security Mulawa Prison.
“There was rape, bashings, hair-pulling, shaving of heads, scalding water,” Hays said in a 1981 interview with ABC's Four Corners.
And the realisation that Vern had duped them was sickening.
“I hated my nephew, like I never had anybody in my life,” Hays said.
Vern mysteriously disappeared only hours before Hays and Bessire were arrested. Little is known about his life after that, up until his death in Los Angeles in 2019, after suffering from Alzheimer's.
To this day, Khoury is disappointed to have never caught “the protagonist in the whole story”.
“The main man got away, absolutely got away,” she says.
“And to think that he allowed his aunt and her beloved partner to take the rap for it … without any implication for him is an absolute disgrace. I hold nothing but contempt for him.”
'Tearing our guts apart'
Hays and Bessire were New South Wales’ oldest female prisoners.
“There were like grandmothers,” recalls Shirley Goodfellow, Mulawa’s deputy superintendent at the time.
“They're always courteous … I never got any trouble from them at all,” she says.
“A lot of the girls used to call them Gran or Nan … they were willing to listen to the prisoners … and I think sometimes they stopped a lot of brawls that would have happened … because the girls came to respect them.”
But in audio cassettes they used to record "letters" home to friends and family, the women, who had been dubbed “the drug grannies” by the media, revealed they were struggling to cope with life in prison.
In an audio letter to her sisters, Hays said the experience “has almost completely destroyed us”.
“It has to end … oh God, please make it soon. We've got to get home to our loved ones,” she said, breaking down.
By 1981, after several failed applications to the federal attorney-general for their release, the women’s health was declining and both were “deeply depressed”, Logan says.
“It's just tearing our guts apart,” Hays said in another tape recording from prison.
“And I don't know how much more of this we're going to be able to take unless something happens pretty soon.”
A change of government, a glimmer of hope
By the end of 1981, pressure on the Australian government to release the women was ramping up.
Logan, along with the women’s legal team and several Christian networks, had started campaigning for Hays and Bessire’s release.
In early 1982, Logan visited the US Capitol to lobby on the women's behalf. An Oregon Republican leader wrote to then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser to ask for leniency.
Hays and Bessire made a new application for release and Australian attorney-general Peter Durack knocked it back again.
The women were now in their fifth year behind bars. “They could only exist from day to day,” Logan says.
In an audio letter recorded on March 18, Hays talked about the federal election and Malcolm Fraser losing the prime ministership to Bob Hawke.
With the change of government, and a new attorney-general, a glimmer of hope was forming.
“The new attorney-general is Senator Gareth Evans. We pray to God that it won’t be too long before he'll get us out of here,” Hays said.
They were prophetic words. On March 23, Evans issued a media release announcing the women were to be released from prison.
“Both Miss Bessire, 66, and Mrs Hays, 65, will be deported to the United States as both are citizens of that country,” the statement read.
Evans says today that, though the original sentence was consistent with the law at the time, the Fraser government's handling of the case had become about “politics, pure and simple”.
“What became unedifying, I think, was the way in which politics so obviously intruded in … the handling of this … [It was] just a fear of being painted as soft on drugs, which no government wants to be.”
But on that day in March 1983 Hays and Bessire were joyous. Amid the celebrations, they once again hit record on a cassette.
“We finally got the news, today's the day, we're going home,” Hays said, to the cheers and applause of fellow prisoners in the background.
The women returned to Oregon, to a little trailer home in the woods.
Just three years later, in 1986, Hays died. Bessire died in 1998, aged 82.
“One of the last things that Beezie said to me was how much she missed her dear friend and companion Toddie [Hays],” Logan says.
Today, both the women’s voices still loom large.
In that last diary entry from jail, recorded just hours before the women’s release, Hays called out to her fellow prisoners, “God love you all”.
“We’re going to be on our way.”
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